This invention relates to the scanning of documents and the recognition of alphanumeric symbols generally, and particularly to optical scanning and recognition of CMC7 bar-coded characters.
The CMC7 character set, which was developed by the French Company Compagnie des Machines Bull, has received widespread use in financial transactions in many countries, primarily in Europe. Generally, the characters are recorded on documents such as bank drafts and checks in MICR (magnetic ink character record) form for scanning by a magnetic scanner.
A vidicon camera is sometimes used to scan the document and to record an image of it for archival and evidentiary purposes while, in a separate operation, a magnetic scanner is used to read the magnetic-ink characters. This need for two separate scanners to perform two separate operations presents a costly, time-consuming problem.
Another frequent problem, generally associated with optical character recognition, is character adulteration. Character adulteration occurs when the characters, e.g., those printed along the bottom of a document such as a check, are partly obscured (stamped-over or written-over) by stamped information, payor's signature, or a teller's comment.
What is needed and would be useful, therefore, is a system which would not only provide for image scanning and character recognition, thereby eliminating the requirement for two systems and two operations, but would also be able to correctly read partly-obscured characters.